
Hendrik Buschmeier
I am a tenure-track assistant professor (Juniorprofessor) of Digital Linguistics at the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies, Bielefeld University.
I received a PhD in Computer Science from the Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University and have worked in the CITEC research group Social Cognitive Systems Group (Stefan Kopp). I have been involved in the research projects KOMPASS (BMBF-funded), ‘Rhythm and Timing in Dialogue’ (DFG-funded), and ‘Dialogue Coordination for Sociable Agents’ (CITEC-internal funding).Open Position: I am currently seeking to fill a PhD-student position (E13 TV-L, 65%, fixed-term) in the area of computational modelling of dialogue and spoken interaction, specifically interactive models of dialogue phenomena (e.g., reference, feedback, politeness). Questions? Get in touch! Application deadline: Feb. 18. 2021.
Research Interests
My general area of interest is computational modelling of the representations, processes, and behaviours underlying the human capability for interacting in dialogue. In particular, I am interested in the issue of how a joint understanding can be achieved among autonomous conversational agents (human or artificial), including questions such as: How can an agent know whether and how its utterances are understood by its interaction partner? How can it know what the reasons for problems in understanding are? How can an agent design and adapt its utterances and behaviours so that mis-understandings are repaired and future ones avoided? How do agents coordinate their behaviour, cooperate to achieve joint goals, and collaborate on the construction of a joint understanding? Finally, I am interested in how a joint understanding can be achieved in an effective yet efficient way, such that a model is plausible from a cognitive and linguistic point of view, and practical from a computational point of view.
Selected Publications
See the complete list of publications organised by topic, by date, or on Google scholar.
Buschmeier, H., & Kopp, S. (2018). Communicative listener feedback in human–agent interaction: artificial speakers need to be attentive and adaptive. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, pp. 1213–1221, Stockholm, Sweden. [pdf/preprint, bib, material, poster] *Best Paper Award Socially Interactive Agents Track*
Buschmeier, H. (2018). Attentive Speaking. From Listener Feedback to Interactive Adaptation. PhD-thesis, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany. [PDF, bib]
Buschmeier, H., & Kopp, S. (2014). A dynamic minimal model of the listener for feedback-based dialogue coordination. In SemDial 2014: Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, pp. 17–25, Edinburgh, UK. [pdf, bib, model]
Buschmeier, H. & Kopp, S. (2013). Co-constructing grounded symbols—Feedback and incremental adaptation in human–agent dialogue. Künstliche Intelligenz, 27:137–143. [pdf/preprint, bib]
Buschmeier, H., Baumann, T., Dosch, B., Kopp, S., & Schlangen, D. (2012). Combining incremental language generation and incremental speech synthesis for adaptive information presentation. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pp. 295–303, Seoul, South Korea. [pdf, bib, video]
Buschmeier, H., Malisz, Z., Włodarczak, M., Kopp, S., & Wagner, P. (2011). ‘Are you sure you’re paying attention?’ – ‘Uh-huh’. Communicating understanding as a marker of attentiveness. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2011, pp. 2057–2060, Florence, Italy. [pdf/preprint, bib]
Buschmeier, H., Bergmann, K., & Kopp, S. (2009). An alignment-capable microplanner for natural language generation. In Proceedings of the 12th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, pp. 82–89, Athens, Greece. [pdf, bib]
Software
- TextGridTools – Read, write, and manipulate Praat TextGrid files with Python (with Marcin Włodarczak)
- IPAACA – Incremental Processing Architecture for Artificial Conversational Agents (with Ramin Yaghoubzadeh)
- PRIMO – Probabilistic Inference Modules (with Jan Pöppel)
Teaching
Current and Recent Courses
- Informationsstrukturierung (Lecture and Lab-Session)
(Winter 2020) - Language and interaction (Lecture)
(Summer 2020) - Modelling Politeness for Conversational Agents (Seminar)
(Summer 2020) - Auszeichnungssprachen (Lecture)
(Summer 2020) - Auszeichnungssprachen (Tutorial)
(Summer 2020) - Informationsstrukturierung 2 (Seminar)
(Summer 2020)
See the complete list of courses.
Current and Recent Activities
- Co-Editor of the Special Issue on “Computational Dialogue Modelling: The Role of Pragmatics and Common Ground in Interaction“ of the Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics (IJCoL), to appear 2021. See the call for papers.
- Workshop on Creativity in Language and Communication, February 18–19, 2021, Bielefeld, Germany.
- 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Generation for Human–Robot Interaction (at
HRI 2020INLG 2020, December 15–18, 2020, virtual meeting). - Co-Editor of the Special Issue on Intelligent Virtual Agents of the Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces (JMUI), to appear 2020.
- 19th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, Jul 2–5, 2019, Paris, France. The proceedings are now available in the ACM Digital Library.
- Workshop on Natural Language Generation for Human–Robot Interaction (at INLG 2018, Nov 8, 2018, Tilburg, The Netherlands). The proceedings are now available in the ACL-Anthology.
Contact
Email: hbuschme@uni-bielefeld.de
Twitter: @hbuschme
Phone: +49 521 106-12171
Mail: PO-Box 10 01 31, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany
Face-to-face: UHG-C5-201 computer-mediated only
Office hours: by appointment
My public PGP key (see also on keybase.io):
6299 7D58 9F34 DBE8 3BA2 918E F282 86FE 624C BCD5